WHY ARE SF NOVELS SO LONG?

A very interesting post by science fiction writer Charles Stross (you can read his account of his background here, and here‘s the requisite Wikipedia article) about why the length of a typical novel has doubled since the ’60s. Here’s the heart of the explanation he got from one of his editors:

Until the early 1990s, mass market SF/F paperbacks in the US were primarily sold via grocery store racks, supplied by local distributors (400+ of them). The standard wire rack held books face-out, either against a wall or on a rotating stand. And that’s where the short form factor novel became established. Thinner books meant you could shove more of them into a rack that was, say, three inches deep. Go over half an inch thick, and you could no longer fit six paperbacks in a 3″ rack. And there was only so much rack space to go around.
During the inflationary 1970s and early 1980s, prices of just about everything soared. The publishers needed to increase their cover prices to compensate. But the grocery wholesalers who sold the books insisted “the product’s gotta weigh more if you want to charge more”. They weren’t in the book business, after all, so just as buffalo tomatoes got bigger, so did paperbacks. (Even though this meant there was less room to go round in the wire racks.) You can only get so much milage by using thicker paper and a bigger typeface; so they began looking for longer novels.

(Via MetaFilter; there’s much more detail, and discussion of why mystery novels haven’t similarly ballooned, at Charlie’s post.) How I hate that kind of economic pressure that has nothing to do with the quality of the work! And how fondly I remember those wire racks!

Comments

I was going to take issue with the comment that German is 40% more verbose than English. I figured that was an illusion created by the fact that translators often throw in extra words to cover shades of meaning instead of searching for just the right mot juste. So I decided to prove that out by comparing various translations from 3rd languages into both German and English. No word count, but pages as a proxy seem to demonstrate that German really is about 40% more verbose:
El amor en los tiempos de cólera – German 509 pp, English – 368 pp
Master i Margarita – German 510 pp English 384 pp
Les Particules Elementaires – German 384 English 272 pp
Fairly consistent, and unfortunate ammunition for efficiency experts who will continue to push English on us all.

Is is just that German is more verbose (uses more words), or could it be that on the average German words are longer than their English counterparts (even discounting that the components of German compounds are written all together, but English often separates them)?

Is is just that German is more verbose (uses more words), or could it be that on the average German words are longer than their English counterparts (even discounting that the components of German compounds are written all together, but English often separates them)?

Maybe that’s why I stopped reading Sci Fi back in the 80’s. I want stock characters that don’t have to be explained, an interesting science concept taken to the next level in the future, female characters that have adventures instead of spending all their time cleaning, and lots of action and chase scenes from one planet to another. None of this tedious character development and pages of mind-numbing conversation that doesn’t advance the plot. If magazine used to have great SF short stories–that’s how a lot of the greats got their start.

My brother (a rocket scientist, literally) has always been a big SF fan, & has said that one change in recent science-fiction is that the science part is significantly harder. Advancement in scientific understanding has constrained plausible futures.
He also complains that current SF that doesn’t take the technological singularity into account is flawed for that reason. But not everyone is a singularitarian.

It might also be the Herbert effect. (In fantasy, the proper term would be the Tolkein effect.)
Not being a sci-fi fan, I’m not going to say this started with Dune, but Dune is one of the earlier example. Sci-fi authors are expected to be, like fantasy writers, sub-creators: they’re supposed to supply not just a basic story but include as much as possible detail on the universe they’ve constructed for this novel. It’s not enough just to land on Planet Zed and tell us what happened; one must also (hopefully with good literary techniques) describe the fauna, flora, and prior history of intelligent races on Planet Zed).

So the size of a book rack defines the ‘proper length’ of a novel. I am reminded of some luxury apartments that I came across whose market appeal lay in the quality of the architecture. The apartments were actually sized so that the columns supporting them suited three cars parked side by side two floors below. It was good design but a similar mix of art accommodating geometry.
Across town a friend had some empty redundant factory buildings of little value. She rented them out occasionally to TV companies to make some meagre return. It then struck me how many crime series on TV had chases that ended in cavernous industrial sheds, places no sane person would run to, in order to hide. It was of course the cheapness, (and availability) of the location that drove the story.
All art is influence by commerce and context (look at the revolution synthetic pigments caused in painting). Perhaps there is a thesis to be written, ranking art forms according to their independence of the material world.
Poetry would come out pretty high for independence I would think.
Perhaps this is why some poets cleave to the metaphorical geometry of syllable counts, rhythm patterns and rhyming schemes, protecting themselves from the vertigo of total freedom.

AJP: As another SF reader – although like Hat I haven’t read too much lately – I love the idea of space travel and advanced technology, and I’m not too worried about character development. So for me the golden age of SF was the 60s-70s-early80s in magazines such as Analog, of which I have somewhat of a collection.
I don’t much care for stories of survival on Earth after nuclear holocaust/meteor strike etc [with the exceptiuon of Earth Abides for some reason].
For light reading, I find it much more enjoyable than contemporary novels which seem to be mostly about anguish, despair, dysfunctional people and families, etc, about which we hear enough on the news anyway.

Is it something specific to sf that you enjoy?
Very much so, but there’s not much point trying to explain it to someone who doesn’t read it, any more than one can explain the appeal of cats to someone who doesn’t like cats.

I didn’t say you didn’t like it, but if you don’t read it (assuming you never have, which you didn’t say) there’s no way to explain what’s appealing about it, other than waving my hands and muttering about “sense of wonder.”

Stu, I realize my “Study” is very imperfect – I did compare paperback vs. paperback though. It may just demonstrate that Germans prefer smaller thicker paperbacks than English speakers. Honestly I was too lazy to do a real analysis, just throwing it out there. I was just struck by how consistently in that (admittedly small) sample the German really was around 40% longer in every book I looked at.

I don’t think it’s that hard to explain the appeal of science fiction – it’s easier than trying to explain poetry or jazz. “Hard core” scifi, as opposed to say “1984”, “A Clockwork Orange” “Infinite Jest”, which are all really SciFi in every way, appeals to people who like conceptual thinking. There’s an escapist element, sure, but a lot of Scifi is about taking a premise – what if FTL space travel were possible, what if humanity met an alien race, what if Bolsheviks took over the UK, etc. and extrapolating the consequences. “Hard core” SciFi tends to focus more on the concept than the characters. If you don’t enjoy “what if” games there’s a good chance SciFi won’t appeal to you as a genre.

I am reminded of some luxury apartments that I came across whose market appeal lay in the quality of the architecture. The apartments were actually sized so that the columns supporting them suited three cars parked side by side two floors below.
Un-fucking-believable. But let me tell you something. Nearly all buildings that have parking below are, if they’re out of concrete, laid out on a roughly seven fifty to eight metre column grid. Any architect will tell you — luxury or no luxury — this is because clients are reluctant to have columns in the middle of the parking spots. It’s one of those things. Believe me, they start coming out with stuff like ‘Well that space doesn’t count’. I’ll tell you something: these bastards are lucky to have parking spots at all, let alone ones that work. Then they stop paying their bills and we have to call up this guy. I don’t want to know how he gets the money. To think I went to school for this.

Though it’s true I don’t read it I never said I didn’t like it.
Most hard core sf aficionados started out with Robert Heinlein. His future histories were classic, although now I find him a bit sophomoric. He had been an electronics type I think in the navy, so his technical stuff was plausible.
Isaac Asimov I think stands up under the test of time pretty well. He had an excellent series about robots–how would a robot have to be designed to interact with humans?–so he developed the laws of robotics. His foundation trilogy was also excellent, again a sort of future history of the universe. Again Asimov was a real scientist, which is part of why his stories were believable. There was also a bit about the chemical Thiotimoline that I found amusing.
Ray Bradbury I enjoyed for his mellowness/wistfulness. There was a series of Martian chronicles. He did some other short stories about carnivals and such that were odd but maybe not so much science fiction.
Larry Niven my husband introduced me to and I would wait for him to finish one and then read it. Niven’s creatures were excellent. What would an extraterrestrial species with three sexes look like?
There are other authors I read for the ideas, who were widely read, but I didn’t enjoy them.
There is also Andre Norton, who did some passable sf about a trade ship that met up with various species, but also did a Witch World series that was more in the fantasy/alternate universe vein. I don’t usually read fantasy at all, but at the time enjoyed these almost as much as Tolkien. Norton’s earlier novels were the better ones.

Although I love SF in concept, I more or less abandoned it many years ago because I had grown dissatisfied with what I felt was authorial laziness — both in terms of the psychology and behavior of the characters and in terms of failing to take ideas to their logical conclusions. I’m only starting to return to it now. Gene Wolfe’s short stories and Book of the New Sun series have been enjoyable and seem to have a curious inner logic even if they don’t bother themselves with much psychological depth. (He famously has a short story in “Strange Travelers” about someone who stumbles upon a phrasebook for an unknown language.) The science fiction website io9.com regularly reviews or recommends contemporary publications, which you can easily find by typing “novels” in their search box. The site’s mix of science fiction, science, futuristic architecture, and so on may also give you a taste of what people like about the genre.

I read some essays about science by Isaac Asimov when I was about twelve and really enjoyed them. I liked that science fiction story where everybody goes blind after watching a brilliant display of falling stars and the world is then ruled by cactuses from outer space. I like JG Ballard, but not so much his science fiction — if that’s what it is, actually.

I tend to like Science Fiction in theory more than practice. I really don’t like is ‘hard’ science fiction since a. I usually can’t understand it (I’m proud of my limitations) b. one generation’s hard science is another generations ‘silly things people used to believe’ (these may seem to be contradictory concerns but that’s how I roll).
What I do like is science fiction that explores the limits of human experience but the humans in much of science fiction are so boring (to me) that it can be hard slagging (except as bubble gum disposable public transport reads).
I also like science fiction that explores alien concepts, realities etc. but too often the aliens are just thinly disguised two-dimensional humans. I loved Octavia Butler’s exogenesis trilogy at least partly because the secrets and character and history of the Oankali are dribbled out throughout the course of the books in a way that made it clear that it had all been thought out before she finished the first book (and in a way that makes them more interesting if not appealing).
I also liked the idea of the obsessive compulsive aliens hunting over the universe for a species they lost contact with in Ian Watson’s the Embedding (one of the few novels to treat linguistics and language concepts realistically).

Isaac Asimov I think stands up under the test of time pretty well.
Except that he was a terrible, terrible writer (in the sense in which non-genre readers understand that word). I would never recommend him to anyone over the early-adolescence age when most of us fell in love with the field.
I’d start with short stories by people who could actually write, like C.M. Kornbluth, Damon Knight, Theodore Sturgeon, Cordwainer Smith, Avram Davidson, R.A. Lafferty, Ted Chiang, Terry Bisson, and the great James Tiptree Jr. (actually a woman named Alice Bradley Sheldon; she had a fascinating and ultimately tragic life). SF is basically a short-story/novelette field anyway (though it has produced wonderful novels), and reading a few stories is a small investment in time and effort. If you find you have a taste for it, I’ll be delighted to provide further recommendations.

What about Philip K. Dick? He was very popular with a couple of the cruise -ship architects I used to work with, but I’ve never read him myself.
“Your comment could not be submitted due to questionable content: cruise -ship”
Ha ha. First I thought they meant ‘dick’. But I agree, cruise -ships are pretty questionable content.

Philip K. Dick was an amazing writer, and if you like him you’ll really like him, but he’s not to everyone’s taste, and I hesitate to recommend him to someone who’s looking to dip a toe into the field for fear they’ll react badly and write off sf in general. But by all means try him out; there are zillions of short stories, and his novels The Man in the High Castle and Martian Time-Slip are classics.

Also Asimov’s science is unfortunately dated and fairly ludicrous at this point. The whole premise of the Foundation Trilogy strikes me as absurd now. I have fond memories of Asimov from childhood but I could not recommend him. LH’s list is a good place to start. I would add Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg for their short stories, as well as David Foster Wallace and Michel Houellebecq.

All I remember from Asimov’s book is that there was a chapter explaining the idea of the half life that I could just about grasp and was very exciting. I think you really need to be older than twelve to understand abstract concepts properly.

In case I have inadvertently offended AJP. What I found irritating about the columns and the car park was the the difference between the rhetoric and critiques being in terms of Art and culture, and the reality the homes being boxes, sized to suite your car. So it was a kind of foppish deceit and that irritated. (It was, as I said, however, truly intelligent design buy the architects and engineers. For those who might know, it saved the cost of a transfer structure.)
As I also said I have no problem at all with, art being influenced by commerce and context, it is the pretence that it isn’t that jars; the head in the clouds that is dismissive of the feet that support it.
But maybe that is enough of theology and geometry.

when it comes to diabolical schemes, AJP’s torturous parking space signs with the pole in the middle of the parking space are just the tip of the iceburg. He is also responsible for cruise ships not having enough powder rooms.

Nij, you may not be aware that I designed the toilets in the ‘adult area’ of the first Disney ship, I think it’s called ‘Disney Magic’ — I can’t remember, it’s so long ago now. They were legendary in their wonderfulness. The ‘concept’, if that’s the right word for a toilet design, was a courtyard at night, where men go and pee against a wall on their way home from a bar. I even put a bronze, circular SPQR Roman manhole on the stone-paved floor (the ship was built in Trieste). There was a pink satin love seat outside the doors that ended up getting cut, but otherwise it was built as designed, the only bit of the whole ship that didn’t get cut to bring the price down, because Disney liked it so much.

That was a shot in the dark, a teasing poke at Kron, but it found its mark! Some architecture is transformational and some is lowest human denominator. AJP’s concept of toilets is appalling–reminds me of the smell around the exit turnstiles of our CTA stations–and does not speak well of Disney hierarchy that he was able to read their minds so well.
There are only two toilets in the world that I know of that have a design awe-inspiring enough to deserve the appellation “sacred space”. One is a pit toilet with only a roof–no walls– overlooking a valley at a Wisconsin commune. Privacy is achieved by distance from any habitations and by a few low bushes that screen the occupant from anyone approaching on the path at a distance.
The other is Um Quais in northern Jordan overlooking the Sea of Gallilee. The top picture is the powder room, the lower one is the terrace of the restaurant with the hills of Syria on the right and the Sea of Gallilee in the far distance. The counter is a piece of marble supported on steel beams. The plant area against the ancient wall is open to the sky.

As someone who works in localization, I can confirm that German is not only more verbose than English (measurement: number of characters), it is notoriously so, the very worst of the FIGS languages in that regard. Translating something with strict width requirements from Japanese to English to German is hell twice over.

AJP’s concept of toilets is appalling–reminds me of the smell around the exit turnstiles
I did the women’s toilets too. They were exactly the same, except no urinals. i can’t remember how many stalls, though it wasn’t such a huge deal: if you wanted, you could always nip back to your cabin. I thought of them as being more like a place to hang out, like at a nightclub, that’s why I wanted the sofa. You wouldn’t believe how many Disney people congratulated me on those toilets, they’d say things like ‘Was it really you who designed them?’

Here, check this out. Here’s a woman who still loves my Disney toilets! You have to scroll down to the photo with the yellow crescent moon in it. I’d forgotten the moon and stars. It’s really peculiar how enthusiastic people get about them, I don’t understand it.

Just let me confirm the greater length of German words and sentences.
(It may, BTW, be an artefact of the fact that Standard German is so conservative phonologically. Most dialects have undergone lots of syn- and apocope.)

He also complains that current SF that doesn’t take the technological singularity into account is flawed for that reason.

The singularity has been licensed by Microsoft and we’re going to alpha-test it in real time. I’m really looking forward to this!
If anyone’s still alive, Singularity 1.1 might be sort of OK. Once we get to Singularity 3.0 Gates will introduce a completely new Singularity Operating System for us to alpha-test.

The singularity has been licensed by Microsoft and we’re going to alpha-test it in real time. I’m really looking forward to this!
If anyone’s still alive, Singularity 1.1 might be sort of OK. Once we get to Singularity 3.0 Gates will introduce a completely new Singularity Operating System for us to alpha-test.

I am not sure I quite understand the Singularity, but it reminds me of a work I had to read for a course once: Mount St Michel and Chartres, by Henry Adams (the one who did not become president of the US after the revolution). In it he developed the theory that history had been revving up and accelerating since the Middle Ages, so he thought it would end soon (I seem to remember that history would not go beyond 1922).

The Education of Henry Adams is one of the weirdest books ever. It’s in the third persons and completely without affect. I’ll excuse that in Marcus Aurelius, but who is Henry Adams for Christ’s sake? Just some guy, not a Roman Emperor.
He portrays his younger self as having been an utterly ingenuous, clueless sucker, and this goes on for several years and 100+ pages. It’s like one of those movies where the killer is lurking in the closet and you want to scream at the victim “WATCH OUT!” But what you want to scream at young Henry Adams (who gets NO help from old Henry Adams, who tells the story flatly, without any comment) is “HENRY! DON’T TRUST GLADSTONE! HE’S MESSING WITH YOUR HEAD!”

The Education of Henry Adams is one of the weirdest books ever. It’s in the third persons and completely without affect. I’ll excuse that in Marcus Aurelius, but who is Henry Adams for Christ’s sake? Just some guy, not a Roman Emperor.
He portrays his younger self as having been an utterly ingenuous, clueless sucker, and this goes on for several years and 100+ pages. It’s like one of those movies where the killer is lurking in the closet and you want to scream at the victim “WATCH OUT!” But what you want to scream at young Henry Adams (who gets NO help from old Henry Adams, who tells the story flatly, without any comment) is “HENRY! DON’T TRUST GLADSTONE! HE’S MESSING WITH YOUR HEAD!”

Actually, The Education of Henry Adams was the book which was required reading, but I also read the other book because I was such a dedicated student. The Education was one of the most boring books, perhaps even the most boring one, I have ever read. The first two chapters were not too bad because he talks about his childhood and youth and the early White House (in the third person), but afterwards it was awful. I don’t think I finished the book. The previous year this book had been on the exam and students had failed in droves because they had not read it (there was no choice of topic). Fortunately I had better luck as my exam topic was much more interesting.
Henry Adams was the grandson of John Adams and the nephew of John Quincy Adams, so being president was in the family and he grew up expecting he would be president, but he seems to have been rather nerdy (and repressed) and of course did not get anywhere near being president, and never quite got over it. He became a history professor instead, with a bizarre understanding of the course of history (see above).

Excellent toilets, AJP, all is forgiven. I love those efficient little European bathroom toys, especially the hose thingies on the shower head. And the designs–a combination of Deco and contemporary. I’ve been really bummed about architecture lately, what with the sterility of Millennium Park and the new Soldier Field, and new aluminum and glass and concrete high rise buildings in general, but you, Kron, have renewed my faith in architecture as an honorable profession.
I don’t really look like Lauren Bacall either.

[DM] Just let me confirm the greater length of German words and sentences.

The original claim was that German is more verbose than English and French. That is not a claim about the greater length of German words and sentences. The latter might be true, if it could be made clear what is longer than what.
It is not the case that any German word is longer than any English word. So there apparently is an assumption that only certain German words are to be compared with certain English words. What might be the criteria for selecting what is to be compared with what? Something like “the meaning”, or what the words “refer to”? What do adverbs and verbs refer to? Does someone seriously intend to use “reality” as a common unit for comparing languages with each other? Or do we have to pop UG to see the truth here?
Whatever the verbosity and length claims “mean”, if they are supposed to be “scientific” or “objective”, they should predict something testable. Do they imply, for instance, that I should run out of breath or time when speaking German instead of English? But that doesn’t happen.
Note that I am not saying that the opposites of these claims are true. Rather, I am saying that the claims, as they have been put forward, make little sense, and are playthings of an idle hour. The crude epistemological and ontological scaffolding around these claims does take my breath away.
Is any linguist here unaware of the phenomena which notions like speech registers, genre, code-switching are intended to address?

Notice the misuse of “flawed” to mean “not up-to-date” or “inferior in quality”. I’ve tried to misuse “mangelhaft” in a similar way. Both “flawed” and “mangelhaft” are being misused – so what is the significance of “flawed” having fewer letters than “mangelhaft”?

Don’t thank me, Nij, thank Walt Disney. I don’t normally do stuff like that. Plus I only did the original idea drawings, I didn’t supervise the construction or choose the (not very nice) material colours.
Verbose means using more words than necessary, so I don’t think German is verbose, exactly, but I’m sure it requires on average more words than English does to say the same thing — so does Spanish. But SO WHAT? WHO CARES? What, are you going to run out of scrabble letters? I think not.

Maybe “The Education of Henry Adams” was being used as a screening book to decide who was responsible to go on to the next level. That would be an excellent use for it. I found the experience of reading the book unique, sort of like watching someone trying to start his car for forty minutes. I’ve seen no other book like it in that respect. But I didn’t finish it either. I had the feeling that the car still wouldn’t have started by the end. Once you figure out the plot of a book, it becomes less interesting. In a way it’s sort of an anti-book, something that Oulipo might be proud of: “watch young Henry Adams be baffled by an elementary paradox of worldliness repeatedly and continuously for many years of his life.

Maybe “The Education of Henry Adams” was being used as a screening book to decide who was responsible to go on to the next level. That would be an excellent use for it. I found the experience of reading the book unique, sort of like watching someone trying to start his car for forty minutes. I’ve seen no other book like it in that respect. But I didn’t finish it either. I had the feeling that the car still wouldn’t have started by the end. Once you figure out the plot of a book, it becomes less interesting. In a way it’s sort of an anti-book, something that Oulipo might be proud of: “watch young Henry Adams be baffled by an elementary paradox of worldliness repeatedly and continuously for many years of his life.

The book was among four required readings (there were some other recommended readings) for Littérature et civilisation américaines and it must have been assigned for the history it contained, not the literary merit. I don’t remember the others except Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. I read a lot more American literature of all periods than just the four required books and enjoyed most of what I read, but what a bore Henry Adams was. An anti-book indeed! if you were not already a voracious reader it would make you disgusted with reading forever. In an Amazon type list it would probably drop off the bottom of the list.

I would like to echo Mr. Hat’s expression of thanks to John Emerson and marie-lucie. The Education of Henry Adams had been on my lifetime reading list as well. It sounds like the book has far less nutritive value than is advertised.

I suppose the only readers who would have a use for the book would be specialists in the early days of the American republic looking for snippets of information about the Adams family and other historical characters, but for the general reader the tone is so flat that you can’t remember anything about those people. Talk about a missed opportunity!

A coupla years ago I read the claim that modern novels (and in particular subsmissions to publishers) are getting longer and longer due to the advent of computers and wordprocessors.
Suddenly people aren’t ‘constrained’ by having to write by hand and then type up three copies with carbon paper on a manual typewriter.
Who was it said the only reason, he was considered a better writer than his contemporaries, was that he wrote his first draft in pencil rather than biro* (that, then, being the second draught). Hemmingway?
*or so Lynneguist tells me it’s called.

Wait — I overdid it! I think that everyone interested in American studies should read about 40-60 pages of TEOHA, just for the “OMFG! Who is this guy! How could any living human being think this way?” experience.
He is, as it were, blood of my blood and flesh of my flesh, my Yankee forebear born only 108 years before me (albeit infinitely more eminent than anyone in the Emerson line to which I belong). But to me he seems as bizarre as an Amazonian witch doctor or a Hindu fakir.

Wait — I overdid it! I think that everyone interested in American studies should read about 40-60 pages of TEOHA, just for the “OMFG! Who is this guy! How could any living human being think this way?” experience.
He is, as it were, blood of my blood and flesh of my flesh, my Yankee forebear born only 108 years before me (albeit infinitely more eminent than anyone in the Emerson line to which I belong). But to me he seems as bizarre as an Amazonian witch doctor or a Hindu fakir.

I’m VERY surprised that nobody has said anything so far about the *excellent* science-fiction produced in Eastern Europe: I’m a huge admirer of the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, who to my mind deserves a (posthumous, alas!) Nobel prize in literature: his novels on first contact between humans and aliens (THE INVINCIBLE, SOLARIS, HIS MASTER’S VOICE and FIASCO), and his short stories on robots, especially, stand head and shoulders above any other fiction I’ve read on the topic (indeed, I believe FIASCO is the greatest science-fiction novel ever written, with HIS MASTER’S VOICE and SOLARIS being the contenders for second and third place). I know little of Russian science-fiction, but tremendously enjoyed reading the Strugatskii Brothers’ PIKNIK NA OBOCHINE, also a story on first contact between humans and aliens, and also far better than any other science-fiction (except Lem’s) which I’ve ever encountered.

Among Lem’s short stories involving robots I’ve always liked THE DRAGONS OF PROBABILITY (its opening paragraphs, wherein INTER ALIA mention is made of a “school of higher neantical nihility”, an institution which, as its name suggests, only studies phenomena which do not exist, always makes me smile). Hat: if you like science-fiction in general I would suggest the best Lem novel for you would be THE INVINCIBLE: his short stories of Pirx the Pilot are also much closer, thematically, to typical science-fiction than most of the rest of his work.
Another science-fiction novel I’m surprised hasn’t been brought up: Walter Miller’s A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, which many consider the finest work of post-apocalyptic science-fiction ever written (it’s certainly the best such work I’ve ever read).

Workmanlike implies well-crafted, crap implies badly-crafted. How can the consensus be that he’s crap when everyone who has discussed his work here (including you) likes it?
Are you related to ‘Big’ Ben, of the Wolfson Foundation? If so, do give him my regards.

My understanding of Philip K. Dick (haven’t read any that I remember) was that the ideas behind his work are really compelling as are the basic story arcs (which is why so many movies have been made from them).
On the other hand, his actual prose style is nothing special and/or kind of sloppy.

Hrm, I thought the consensus was that he’s actually kind of a crap writer, or at best workmanlike?
I don’t think “crap” is fair, but in any case I wasn’t talking about his prose, I meant he was an amazing science fiction writer. (It should be borne in mind that he had to write very quickly to pay the bills and didn’t have time to polish his prose.)

Nijma: They’ve certainly poshed up Um Qais. Last (only) time I saw it, there was a certain amount of noisy and incandescent activity going on across the valley, but then that was in October 1973. I do vaguely remember a good meal there, however.

I believe Philip K. Dick suffered from acute paranoia, possibly drug-induced, and did much of his writing while in the grips of extreme psychosis, so that it is unsurprising that, whereas the ideas and concepts behind his stories and novels were typically quite new and original (and typically involved altered reality, illusion and misperception), the stories and novels themselves often give the impression of being rough drafts that need to be smoothed over and polished.

Um Qais/Gadara–only the resthouse and museum have been restored. They started renovating it but ran into a snag because the locals who had been living in the buildings were not happy with the way they had been moved out of the Ottoman village. I think a French firm was doing the work. When I was there a big crane was sitting unused beside that incredible black basalt theater.

Ah, this is the thread. (With all the thread drift it becomes very difficult to remember which thread any topic was discussed on.) I disagree with the translations (way) above and will try to supply better ones, and other examples, tomorrow or something.
I do agree, though, that it’s not obvious whether German “is more verbose” = uses more words than English to express the same things.

If I wanted to actually explore the question my hypothesis would be that German “is more verbose” but that _German speakers_ are more verbose with a cultural preference to use more rather than fewer words in most writing.
Interestingly (or not). Sometimes I have cause to mention the general Anglophone idea that brevity is a function of efficiency and Polish students have mostly never heard this before and reject it immediately.
Maybe related? When students translate from English to Polish the results almost always take up more space on the paper even when the word and space counts are less than the original. I’m thinking this has something to do with word length (Polish words are on average longer than English ones).
Anyone who’s spent time in Europe will notice that in multilingual printed material, different languages use diffrent amounts of space. Spanish German and French seem to take up the most space while English and the German Scandinavian languages seem to take up the least.
Interestingly this correlates fairly well with both measures of Uncertainty Avoidance and the distinction between Low and High Context cultures.
Both High Context and a high level of Uncertainty Avoidance tend to correlate with using more space in writing (for different reasons that tend to reinforce each other.

I remember noticing on the subway in New York that the advertising, which is often in both Spanish and English on the same piece of cardboard, is always longer in the Spanish version.
It also struck me that except for graphic designers this is totally without significance.

I was involved in the ’80s with a magazine that published in five separate langauge editions. As it ran the same pictures in all editions, it was a lay-out nightmare. The English was always shorter than the French, German, Spanish though similar for the Dutch.

If I may submit my humble opinion, I believe science fiction is the only realm of unexplored literature left to us. It is the final frontier if you will, only it extends as far as we want it to go. I personally am a big fan of Dan Abnett and his Warhammer 40k novels. Not only are his books superbly written, but he manages to offer a great story as well, all while exploring the dark times that loom in the future. And can anyone deny that Ender’s Game was a masterpiece of science fiction? My point is that SF is extraordinarily relevant because it allows us to think about the future in the grander context of humanity and the direction of our race, rather than the pithy daydreaming of an individual life.

But seriously, why stop at humanity? What about the other animals (fish/birds/insects/spiders)?
Philosophy is always going to do a better job than SF for figuring out the possibilities for earthlings. I don’t think you really need a pragmatic reason for SF’s existence and there’s nothing more soporific than a piece of fiction that’s pushing some agenda like ‘save the race’.

Marilyn Stasio, who reviews mysteries for the New York Times, commented recently in her column that mysteries seem to have nearly doubled in size since she started reviewing. It’s certainly true that in the six decades or so that I’ve been reading fiction, the average length of just about all kinds and genres of novels has increased considerably. Some of the trade paperbacks are so heavy now that they’re indistinguishable from the hardcovers. If I get much feebler as I age, soon I won’t be able to lift them.

Perhaps that is because crime novels have been getting more and more like regular novels. No longer the cut and dried, cardboard characters and predictable social milieux of Agatha Christie’s works, but interesting characters and situations that reflect current changing conditions. (I can’t compare with regular novels, as I almost never read recent ones).

Compare PD James’s first novel (Cover here face) with her most recent works that seem to be about three times as long.
I do seem to recall an interview a few years ago (with a mystery author, maybe James but I can’t recall for sure) who said the most difficult thing about writing mysteries now is establishing a believable motivation for murder (since some of the old standbys no longer apply).

One of the ways murder mysteries have reflected the changes of contemporary life is the development of the (American?) murder novel with the lawyer as the main character. These are also written by lawyers: John Grisham is the best known. A FAR better one is Scott Turow. There’s John Mortimer from England, but the ‘Rumpole’ books aren’t mysteries, exactly.

I’ll add Edgar Pangborn (I already know that Hat agrees) to the list of SF writers who are excellent writers. I’ll also note that when I introduced my wife (a lifelong fantasy reader) to Asimov, she found his characterization excellent, a judgement I’ve rarely heard elsewhere. On the other hand, she did marry a nerd.

The main thing I notice about English/Spanish bilingual signs is how much less bureaucratic the Spanish version generally is.

And you can support my book habit without even spending money on me by following my Amazon links to do your shopping (if, of course, you like shopping on Amazon); I get a small percentage of every dollar spent while someone is following my referral links, and every month I get a gift certificate that allows me to buy a few books (or, if someone has bought a big-ticket item, even more). You will not only get your purchases, you will get my blessings and a karmic boost!

Favorite rave review, by Teju Cole:
"Evidence that the internet is not as idiotic as it often looks. This site is called Language Hat and it deals with many issues of a linguistic flavor. It's a beacon of attentiveness and crisp thinking, and an excellent substitute for the daily news."

From "commonbeauty"

(Cole's blog circa 2003)

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